Is that the same bunch of dorks that came up with "no child left behind"?

If so, I wouldn't really use them to prove a point...

Yeah, all that on top of no booze.

An example, ok.

One standard question I use a lot when filling programmer positions for our bug hunting crew is to take a few common entries from our bug report list and ask them "where'd you look for the bug". That usually already gives me a pretty good idea what kind of "thinking" I have in front of me. What I do NOT want to hear is some kind of apology (like "I don't know the code, so I can't say anything specific..."), I know he doesn't know, and that's sadly often exactly the problem he will face, but I still want an answer. You get tossed into this bug, how do you handle it?

Here I like to hear that he is checking the headers so he gets an idea what libraries are used, checks if the libraries are outdated, checks the lib known bugs... or whatever else he'd do, hell, nearly anything is fine. I want to know if he has some kind of general approach to bug hunting. What I don't like to hear is useless ass-covering tactics, some kind of apology or trying to find someone to blame, like finding out who wrote the code 3 years ago. Even if he finds him, that guy certainly won't remember a thing about it.

It's worse when I hire someone for my department directly, we get to face very unique situations daily. Security can be tricky at times, because your problems are not only technology but also very personally, both with personnel security issues as well as secrecy. What I want to see in general in an applicant is whether he has a plan. Whether he can come up with an idea that will solve the problem or at least find the source of it, whether he has "common sense" and whether he knows how people work. That's something that is oddly not taught at any kind of university: People are generally lazy and will gladly cut corners. For some odd reason, everyone with zero "real life" experience will assume that people work according to spec. Hint: They don't.

No, I suggested correlation, not causation, between intelligence and radio waves. Much fewer people were thinking about new inventions partly as a consequence of the species as a whole being less intelligent. Fewer peaks in individuals than now, and far lower troughs among the majority. There are more people today smarter than all but the smartest of the 1890s, partly because we have so many more people but also because we have so many smarter and more smart.

Education and technological tools for amplifying the intellect have indeed changed the species to a more intelligent one. As has culture, partly from the economic pressure to survive using tools that both enhance intelligence and demand more of it.

If we were to discover aliens that had a lot of potential to be intelligent, but just swam around photosynthesizing in the daylight all day, we wouldn't be impressed. We're looking for fellows to learn from, not just about like another animal. It's the information that intelligent aliens would have that's attractive. Most 1700s humans on Earth were pretty dumb.

The average American house consumes about 1.5KW electricity average across the days (and nights) through the weeks of a year. But they not infrequently peak demand in spikes over 2KW. A hairdryer or space heater draws about 1.5KW. A dishwasher (especially with extra washing or drying heat boost) will draw 1.5KW. An electric stove/oven can draw 4KW or even 7KW as it heats up. A vacuum cleaner can draw up to 1.5KW, especially if it's a strong one that gets jammed.

And all of those could happen at once. A couple happening at once is pretty likely at least once a year. Plus the rest of the 1KW regular demand, which is closer to 2KW max, averaged against quiet times closer to 0.1KW.

A home power supply should be close to half the 100A 120VAC panel, which is 6KW. A 5KW max supply is probably just fine. A 2KW fuelcell would need a battery that can output 5KW for at least a few minutes, perhaps while an alarm goes off warning the battery will drain down shortly and circuit breakers will snap.

Really all the residential fuelcells I've seen talked about are 5KW. A 2KW fuelcell seems like a good device for a yacht.

If I had any say, I'd flip education and military budget around, but then we'd have to deal with a soaring unemployment rate, 'cause soldiers can't easily be turned into teachers...

All the points you field are valid and also part of the problem. I also don't see the teacher as some sort of government mandated babysitter so parents can get rid of their brats for at least 6-10 hours a day before they park them in front of the idiot box. A teacher is exactly that. A teacher. His job is to present the curriculum (which by itself needs some heavy overhaul, but let's not get into detail), in a way that the student can understand. It's not his job to make the student pass, it's his job to teach and to test. Period! If a child is disruptive the child may just as well leave the class as far as I am concerned. Actually, I would highly prefer it. If they fail due to them not WANTING to learn it is NOT the teacher's fault.

That doesn't change, though, that the tests themselves are far, far away from reality's requirements. In reality, nobody presents you with some kind of "test task" akin to "solve this equation" or "a triangle is this long and that wide, how long is its circumference". Nobody gives a shit about that. Reality pits you into tasks like "you have a bottle this big, can you fill the contents of a can this big into it or will it spill?"

Such tests needn't be more "taxing" for the teacher, neither for coming up with them nor for grading them. I remember some of my math tests that were quite taxing and tested a good deal of my abilities with less than half a page of specifications and my answers filling roughly the same amount of space. Still took most students the better part of two hours to think it through and figure it out (if they managed at all, but that's a different matter).

How much influence a teacher actually has on the tests, their form and content, of course depends on what he teaches and at what level. I do agree that elementary and high school teachers are very limited in their ability to change tests, with the standardization craze and the "teaching to the test" bullshit that swept the nation. That's what you get if you tie the funding of schools to their "objective" grades. What's the sensible thing to do for a principal? Of course to make sure his students pass the tests with great scores, and that's of course accomplished easiest when you do whatever you can to make them "test-compatible", anything short of outright cribbing is fair game.

But no later than university level, there should be quite a bit of room for testing towards reality.

Yes there are. But bath salts aren't "a new form of valium", either. I didn't say people don't take valium recreationally. The point is that the cops and media aren't saying these synthetics are "scary valium scary". They're not even whining about the actual new forms of valium that some people are taking recreationally.

Bullseye! Can someone hand that guy an insightful mod?

That's exactly what's wrong with our schools (and to a lesser degree even universities). It's simply easier for teachers and educators to come up with cram tests, preferably multiple-choice so they can far easier check the right answers, than to think up some kind of realistic problem and then evaluate the students' solutions, which will invariably differ slightly from one to the next due to them having different, but probably equally valid, approaches. Hell, it might even expose that the teacher knows less of a subject than his student (which isn't as far fetched as it may seem, especially in a field like CS where new developments often render your knowledge obsolete in few years).

It's simple laziness on the side of the teacher, and so we're stuck with tests that favor those who are able to hoover up information like a sponge, pour it out in the test and instantly forget it. I know a few people of that quality. They were doing quite well in school, but out in the reality, they're usually quite useless.

I think you got the GP wrong.

His point is, if I understand him correctly, and I do agree in this point with him, that it becomes more and more obsolete to have a mass of facts in your brains without the ability to apply them. It gets easier and faster every day to look things like that up. What's heaps harder and rarer is the ability to solve problems.

My profs at the university, and I still thank them for that, preferred the latter. I'd have a hard time thinking of any (but pure basic) tests that weren't open book, "bring whatever materials you want" tests. In general, anything but interactive material (read: sending the test to someone else and have him come up with the answers) was pretty much ok. You were actually expected to use your notes and books, because they didn't test what you could stuff into your head, they were much more interested in you showing that you understood what they taught and that you could demonstrate that you can apply it to "real life" problems. The test question were not "solve this equation" but rather "you're facing this problem", with the test being more to come up with a solution rather than actually solving it.

I distinctly remember a math test that I thought I bombed only to find out my prof gave me an B, despite not having finished a single sample. His argument was that I demonstrated I know what approach was necessary, that I showed I did understand how to use the rules required and he expected that I can punch buttons on a calculator when I dare to study CS and am about to graduate, if I couldn't, I probably wouldn't have survived the entry level programming classes.

And that's basically what counts. Today I am often tasked to screen applicants and I throw similar things at them, only to be surprised how many cannot come up with a solution. And interestingly enough, the ones that usually ace my "real life problems" are the ones without a "relevant" degree.

So ... your qualification is, essentially, that your daddy is rich? Unless he plans to invest in my company, how exactly is that going to help me?